The Samsung Fascinate is Verizon’s version of the Galaxy S series of phones. It is in many ways similar to the Captivate on AT&T and the Vibrant on T-Mobile. This is a high-end Android smartphone with customizations added by Verizon and Samsung

Hardware

It’s clear when you pick up this phone that it is a high-end smartphone. It is very sleek, thin, and feels great in the hand. The 4 inch screen is beautiful. I think this might be just the right size for a smartphone. 3.7 inches or less feels a little small to me. 4.3 inch screens are great, but they make the phone a bit large.

Software

Here’s where I have a problem with this phone. The skin that Samsung has added is decent, but I always prefer the unmodified Android interface. The larger issue is that Verizon replaced some of the core Google functionality with Bing, including both search and maps. Android is a Google smartphone operating system which ties into the Google services beautifully. To change any of this to a different service breaks the experience in my opinion.

Overall, you cannot really go wrong with this phone as long as you can deal with Bing. For an in-depth review of this phone see Android Central's review.

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